/Threaded/ The creative block
25/02/2007 | Filed under Discover > Threaded
The Lego Group is one of the few toy companies to have managed the jump into the new millennium. Oliver Lindberg takes a look at the works of the brick-obsessed fans
Gone are the days when just kids played with Lego. These days, dads all over the world snatch their offspring’s brick collection from them, huddle away in dark rooms and spend days putting bits of plastic together only to emerge months later with the most bizarre of Lego creations. Lego, it seems, has become the geek’s favourite toy.
Thousands of so-called AFOLs, Adult Fans of Lego, converge each year on numerous conventions, such as Portland’s BrickFest (www.brickfest.com). AFOLs have got their own podcasts (www.bricksinmypocket.org; brickfilmspodcast.com) and magazine (www.brickjournal.com). Naturally, the web’s crammed with Lego-related madness. Whether it’s ‘art’, complex machinery or brickfilms (that have hit the mainstream since the White Stripes’ video for Fell in Love with a Girl) – it’s all online. There’s the Hammerhead CD thrower (www.philohome.com/hammerhead
/hammerhead.htm) – very useful for James Blunt CDs, the Lego Knitting Machine (homepage.mac.com/aklego/PhotoAlbum22.html) and the Lego lie detector (personal.pitnet.net/usr/gasperi/gsr.htm). An Apple employee called Andy Carol, meanwhile, has built a working difference engine, a mechanical calculator first conceived in 1786 and made famous by Charles Babbage. The Lego version only solves second and third order polynomials to three or four digits, which must make Andy feel a total failure. Babbage’s design, after all, could evaluate seventh order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. Find out more on the page hosted on Steve Wozniak’s web space (acarol.woz.org). Complicated concepts and Lego go well together, it appears: there’s also Lego versions of social theorists at www.theory.org.uk/lego.htm.
Even Google’s Larry Page is said to have built a Lego inkjet printer while at the University of Michigan. Later, he went on to do greater and more useful things with his time. Unlike Lego builder Mark Puustinen, who created a flamethrower that “works by winding a little round knob which pulls the string which pulls the lever which pushes the bottle of butane against a holder with a hole from which butane shoots out from” (www.markuspuustinen.com/homemadeflamethrower). Since playing with Lego when you’re an adult is a bit geeky, it’s no wonder somebody has erected the officially sanctioned Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, complete with doomed courtyard and shrine of the lost meatball (www.reasonablyclever.com/lego/fsm).
Some people have turned playing with Lego into a full-time job. Brick artist Nathan Sawaya discovered the little bricks when he was five. Since then, he’s produced a six foot tall Han Solo frozen in carbonite using more than 10,000 bricks, a three-foot tall Lady Liberty wielding a lightsaber and a portrait of Lindsay Lohan (www.brickartist.com). Elsewhere, Henry Lim sacrificed three years of his life putting together a fully functional harpsichord out of more than 100,000 pieces. Except from the wire pieces, it’s entirely made out of Lego (www.henrylim.org/Harpsichord.html).
The best works of art can be found when Lego imitates real life. A minifig set on Flickr, for instance, recreates the glorious moment in history when vice president Dick Cheney accidentally shot his friend in the face (tinyurl.com/y8eaz5). And there’s brickfilms that show almost more love for detail than the films they’re trying to pay tribute to, like the shot-by-shot recreation of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u2vmMy6ju4). So, you know what to do. Dig out your old Lego (or ‘borrow’ your son’s) for hours of endless fun.
